To get data, I showed peo­ple three pic­tures and asked them to “pick the emo­ji sequence that best describes the scene” and then gave them two options that used dif­fer­ent orders of the same emo­ji. Then, once they were done with the emo­ji part, I asked them to “please type a short sen­tence to describe each scene”.

Far from being the blight that green crit­ics claim it is, food wrap­pings can in fact be an envi­ron­men­tal boon. By more than dou­bling the time that some meat items can stay on shelves, for exam­ple, bet­ter pack­ag­ing ensures that pre­cious resources are used more effi­cient­ly. Plan­et and prof­its both ben­e­fit.

Now don’t get me wrong. Donat­ing to char­i­ty is a good thing, par­tic­u­lar­ly dur­ing the hol­i­days, when many char­i­ties bud­get for yule­tide dona­tions. But, the sim­ple rules of eco­nom­ics are beg­ging you: Give mon­ey to food banks, rather than food.

When Ser­na had some­thing to add, he respond­ed in pro-tac­tile ASL: he tapped and pat­ted his inter­preter (sit­ting next to him) any­where from her shoul­ders to her knees. She trans­lat­ed those taps and pats by sign­ing them in ASL, the most promi­nent form of sign lan­guage in the US with about 2 mil­lion users. A sec­ond inter­preter trans­lat­ed that ASL into spo­ken Eng­lish for me.

Think of Mandy Moore’s “Can-day,” Brit­ney Spears growl­ing “oh bay-bay bay-bay,” Gwen Ste­fani chant­i­ng “hey bay-bay hey bay-bay HEY.” The trend to turn the “ee” sound into “ay” con­tin­ued for years, maybe most mem­o­rably in Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.” (Cray-zay, real­ly.) This isn’t one guy’s vocal quirk: this is a trend, maybe a virus. Why did all these singers change their vow­els in that par­tic­u­lar way?